My chest tightened at the thought that I was returning but now in a different guise altogether: this time as a would-be rescuer.
I brought the hood of my riding cloak up and urged Wraith to a faster pace. The road curved down through a stand of ash trees, and Wraith followed it. Morgan’s ravens had accompanied us the entire journey, cutting against the sky as they called to each other in that hoarse, particular language she’d trained into them. I’d stopped noticing them somewhere around late last night. They’d simply become part of the sound of moving, like Wraith’s hooves, the wind, and my own breathing.
Perhaps it was no surprise that the subject of Lance and Guin had continued to plague me. But, after a while, I’d put it in a box. And I’d shut the lid. Then I’d set the box aside somewhere dark, never to be reopened.
I was good at boxes. I’d first built them when I was young, out of necessity. I had a box for the night my father fell. A box for the morning I walked away from Camelot with Arthur’s voice still ringing in my ears. I had a box for every village I’d passed through on Merlin’s business, burning or broken or both.
And now I had a new box, one titled:Lance and Guin. And this box would hold. It had to hold because it wasn’t the present problem. Guin was that problem. Or, to be more exact: it was the fact that she was sitting in a cell. That was the problem: her location, her condition, and how in the fuck I was going to free her.
No, the problem wasn’t him, and so I focused on my plan, focused on the map of Camelot that sat memorized in my mind. The outer walls ran a thousand feet east to west. I knew that because I’d paced them myself. The King’s Guard rotated in pairs every four hours at the main gates, every six along the curtain wall where the watch posts were spaced far enough apart that a man who knew the gap could move through it like smoke.
The dungeons sat beneath the east tower. They were old construction: older than Arthur, older even than Uther before him. The stone down there sweated in summer and wept in winter, and the guards hated the posting, which meant they were complacent. And that meant they talked too much, moved too little, and spent the small hours of the morning half-asleep with their chins on their chests. I’d seen as much firsthand.
As to Camelot, I knew which corridors turned and which ran straight. I knew the door with the iron bar that dropped when you lifted the handle rather than when you lowered it. I knew there was a drainage channel on the north face of the east tower that ran beneath the foundation wall and came out near the stables, and I knew it was wide enough to fit a slight figure if they didn’t mind the cold and the dark.
She would mind neither. I was certain of that.
I let the variables run through my mind: the Guard rotation, the drainage channel, the ward structure, the entry point, the exit window. Every piece had a place. Every problem had a solution, as long as you built the map carefully enough, as long as you didn’t let anything else in while you were building it.
The walls of Camelot grew taller as Wraith closed the distance between them and us, white stone bleeding gold where the last of the sun caught the parapets and towers. From this distance, the castle looked almost soft, like something from a story told to children: all elegant angles, fluttering banners, and light reflecting off polished surfaces. Beautiful but untouchable, like a lie wrapped in marble.
The time to attempt to free Guin wasn’t right just yet. The sky still held onto its pale blue, bruising darker toward purple overhead, but the stars hadn’t fully emerged yet. Torches were being lit along the walls, tiny flames sparking to life one by one, stringing the perimeter with points of gold. The gates would stayopen for at least another hour, maybe two, letting in the last stragglers and merchants who had timed their approach poorly.
And that meant I would need to wait.
I pulled Wraith off the main road where it curved toward the city gates, guiding him down a narrow track that split off into the trees. They were old-growth oak and ash that pressed close on both sides, their branches forming a canopy thick enough to swallow most of the remaining light. They were enough to hide us for the time being.
Morgan’s ravens descended from somewhere above and arranged themselves along the lowest branch of the nearest oak, their black eyes glossy and unreadable as polished jet. They settled without a sound, folding their wings back into themselves, and simply watched me with the particular quality of patience that belonged to things that weren’t entirely what they appeared to be.
Even though the night hadn’t fully arrived yet, I could already feel it gathering in my blood like a tide pulling itself toward shore. This feeling always came before the dark did. My pulse thickened, and my vision sharpened, the shadows between the trees gaining depth and definition that someone else standing here wouldn’t be able to see. Wraith felt it too. His ears swiveled back toward me, and his skin shivered once along his flank in a ripple of acknowledgment. He shifted his weight beneath me with the quiet patience of a creature who had stood with me many times before.
The compass pulled again, sharp as a knife point, connecting me with her.
“I’m coming, Guin,” I breathed.
I exhaled slowly through my nose and kept my expression neutral, the way my father had taught me before I was old enough to understand why it mattered. Then I dismounted while the last of the light was still useful.
Wraith stood patiently at the tree line as I stripped his saddle and tack, working the buckles by feel. I folded everything into a tight bundle and wedged it into the hollow of a broad oak, covering it with loose bark and leaves until it looked like nothing worth investigating. Wraith nosed at my shoulder once, his breath warm against my neck.
Even though my shadows would disguise us, it was always best to make their job easier by giving them a blank canvas with which to work. And that meant stripping Wraith of his accoutrements. It was a shame, but I doubted I’d get the saddle back. Of course, such was the cost of escape attempts. I just hoped Guin and I wouldn’t pay with much more.
I stepped away from him and into the deeper shadow beneath the canopy, where the trees grew close enough that the darkness between them was absolute.
I closed my eyes.
The shadows were always there, waiting. Most people felt darkness as an absence, the removal of something. I’d spent thirty years learning they were wrong. Darkness had weight, and it had texture. It gathered in corners, pooled in hollows, and moved along surfaces the way water did, finding the low places and filling them slowly and completely. And when I reached for it, the darkness reached back.
I pulled it toward me now the way you’d pull a cloak from a hook, not forcing it. The magic in my blood recognized the motion, and the shadows responded, thickening around my feet first, then curling upward along my legs like smoke given intention. The shadows climbed my torso and spread across my shoulders and neck, and where they touched me, they changed me. My height compressed incrementally, a deep freeze settling through my spine as the shadow folded itself against bone and sinew, rearranging what was visible to the outside world.
My broad shoulders narrowed and rounded forward as my posture, the upright bearing of a man who’d been trained to take up space, now stooped beneath the weight of borrowed years. My jaw thickened, and the stubble on my chin and cheeks began to grow into a long and snarled beard. My nose broadened at the tip and nostrils and developed a redness that hinted at too much ale. Next was my jaw, which was now much fuller, followed by my cheekbones, which took on a round softness.
My hands were the last things to change, and I watched them as the shadow laid itself over my knuckles, thickening the joints and mottling the skin. They were now an old man’s hands: weathered to the texture of old rope, knuckles prominent, veins visible at the wrist. I flexed my fingers, and the sensation was strange, like wearing a glove that fits poorly at the fingertips.
I breathed out and then turned to my right.
The wagon was where it was supposed to be: forty yards east of the main track behind a stand of hawthorn, covered with a canvas sheet weighted at the corners with stones. It was a rented thing from a farmer in Brentwick who hadn’t asked questions about why I was requesting an old wagon to be left unattended by the castle gates. The trick there was in overpayment: simply pay enough to make questions seem impolite.
I pulled the canvas off the wagon and folded it under the bench seat. Then I motioned to Wraith, and he approached with a quick whinny. This was his least favorite part, but he stood still while I worked the shadows over him the same way I’d worked them over myself.
